#TBT to April 2002

You guys!  I wrote this in college!  When I was 21 years old! Man was it tough to be me back then.  I did a pinch of editing to make a few things more clear but this is HILARIOUS.  Also, incredibly dated.

Harsh Realities of Theft Jade Trinity Students
April 16, 2002 <—- I feel so old now!!

In my high school, as well as all other high schools across the nation, we had fire drills once every other month to make sure the students could exit the building quickly and to ensure that all the alarms and lights were in proper order. After the tragic events at Columbine High School, my school even had a few bomb threats by sick students who wanted a laugh at everyone else’s expense. Whether we were out on the football field for 2 minutes or 2 hours, the actions by the students were always the same. Instead of worrying about our own safety and quickly fleeing the “burning” building, every one of us opened our backpacks and grabbed our expensive TI-83 calculators and whatever pricey items we happened to be carrying with us. The “leave everything behind” rule just didn’t apply.This may seem silly to people reading this, but in my graduating class we were lucky enough to have a few “businessmen” who came up with the ingenious idea of stealing people’s calculators and posting them on E-bay. It was pretty much guaranteed that if your calculator was suddenly missing, you could go online the next day and locate it and, in effect, buy it back for about half of what you originally paid. So, coming from a town where your belongings weren’t safe during fire drills, I was pretty much used to the idea of people stealing.

When I decided to come to Trinity, my father gave me a few helpful pieces of advice. He told me to never walk alone, never talk to strangers, don’t take drinks from people I don’t know, and never leave anything of value unattended. I rolled my eyes, as daughters normally do in situations such as these, and disregarded the entire conversation with a quick smile and the ever popular response, “whatever, Dad.” I should have known that, as I have been told my entire life, my father is always right.

Up until a few days ago, I had kept track of virtually everything I arrived with, save a few t-shirts and socks that mysteriously disappeared in the black hole that is the Little laundry room.

Unfortunately for me, everything changed one day this spring. During the half hour break from my 3 hour long design class, me and a couple of friends wandered over to the Bistro to rest our eyes from the tedious work of gluing pieces of wood together or hanging paper clips from a piece of masking tape. Not wanting to return to the shack that houses our classroom, we hung out in the Bistro for a few minutes longer.

When we finally returned to our classroom, I opened my backpack to get my discman and CD’s. To my utter dismay, they were nowhere to be found. It appeared as though someone had forgotten to lock the door to the class and a person, either a resident of Hartford or a student at Trinity had come in off Vernon Street and snatched my discman, all my CD’s, a wallet, and smashed an art project.

I stared in disbelief for a few minutes and then ran over to my friend and asked her if I was blind or if my belongings actually were gone.  Unfortunately, my eyesight was as good as ever. After standing silently for a few minutes, I, with another member of the class, went over to Campus Safety and reported the incident. By the sound of their voices there seemed to be nothing they could do to help me. I talked to my teacher and gained permission to leave class early to call my parents and grieve the loss of my belongings.

After an hour or so of sitting in my room fuming, I decided the only thing I could do to relax was to run off all my aggressions at the gym. I quickly changed into my work-out clothes, grabbed a water, and, forgetting the reason I was going to the gym, looked over at my desk for my discman. It obviously wasn’t there. Reminded of the horrible events of that afternoon, I stormed over to the gym and jumped onto one of the free treadmills. As I was running, I thought about the days when I would grab for my calculator before leaving for a fire drill and wished, sadly enough, that I trusted the people of Hartford (or Trinity) as little as I did the kids in my high school graduating class.

And then the words dreaded by all teen-agers popped into my head: “If only I had listened to my father.”

I guess the moral of this article is that as much as you think it can never happen to you, it can. Your belongings might not be sold on E-bay, but nothing will stop someone from taking what isn’t theirs.  So, until we come up with another penal colony somewhere, keep an eye on your belongings, even if that means grabbing them during a fire drill.

Tags: #tbt, college, Hartford, newspaper, staff writer, theft, Trinity College, Trinity Tripod